I'm just going over some required features for a control panel I'll eventually be coding. Not yet sure if I'll release it or not, but chances are if I will, it will be free.

These are some features I can think of that are a must:

Admin side
- Manage different web site packages
- Manage accounts (assign packages - which affects bandwidth etc)
- Manage account settings - for managed hosting solutions
- Manage permissions (allow/disallow users to manage their own portions such as DNS)
Not MUST, but very useful:
- Ability to "link" servers so you can manage them all from same client session (ex: edit/add account on another server)
- Auto offsite backups of user account settings

User side
- Manage email accounts, domains, subdomains, virtual ftp users, DNS, MySQL
- Easy way to start a backup/restore and download (ex: have it do a tar file of sql data and files)
- Built in ticketing system
- everything using encrypted channels (email, ftp, etc)

Just look at lxadmin, and cpanel, and u can get lots of ideas on features.

Cheers

- Import/Export to other Control Panels

hmm never thought of the import/export thing. Not sure how easy it would be to do but I could setup cpanel and other popular systems on my test server to play around with.

Option to chose different type of server software, like for Mail, Exim, postfix or qMail.

Expandability across multiple servers, clustering/load balancing.

Backup and restoration for resellers.

There are lot many features that are lacking in current popular CP softwares, as Energizer Bunny said study the existing ones and see what more can be done.

Multi language support.